The Muses Hide in Melodies

Everyone, whether to a greater extent or a lesser, has a few melodies or a few lines of poetry which come to mind easily, without a deliberate effort to chase them out; they slip out at just the right moment, nurturing us.

A poem or a song, in context, can become a lover, or a confidante, you understand them, they understand you, and nothing can come between you.

Six lovers of poetry, six songs each with its own story, each revealing a different aspect of life. Then, may we think, is poetry so much farther removed from our laughter or our tears than song?

Moments Musicaux - Yuqiao, 'Persevere and keep on living'.

What are the ‘moments’ that the French term ‘moments musicaux’ refers to? It’s like a piece of seawood tightly knotted on a skewer being suddenly whipped off the skewer, a moment that’s extremely hard to come by.

When I listened to the opera Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, there was an aria towards the end called ‘When I am laid in earth’, whenever Susan Graham sang the words ‘remember me’, it was like a skewer piercing my knotted heart was suddenly ripped out and my chest was released, blood dribbling from the wound. Despite the pain of the bleeding wound, the feeling of release in my chest was soothing, the moments musicaux are as bitter-sweet as Sappho once described eros.

Once I was out window shopping, and I heard a song playing on the speakers, it sounded like the typical pop music song, so I didn’t take much notice, it was quite noisy where I was, so I couldn’t really hear the lyrics. To my surprise, a little while later, the music was suddenly turned up, and everyone seemed to go quiet as if by some sort of common consensus, the line ‘learning how to persevere’ was crystal clear, it was as if the bicycle jammed in the river spirit’s body， in Spirited Away had suddenly come loose, letting forth a tide of rubbish into Yubaba’s baths. I hurried over to ask the owner what the song was called, and only then found out that it was Stephanie Sun’s ‘My Love'

In my office building I like the landings between the stairs the most. Normally everyone uses the elevator, the area between the stairs is used to smoke, to eat, to tune out, to chat, or to hide. Work starts at 8.30, but normally I get there ten minutes early to sit and eat between the stairs. Even in summer the landings were out of the sun and quite cool. While we’re working the fire alarm sounds from time to time, but most people continue sitting without reacting, waiting for the secretary to rack her brains trying to work out if it was really a fire or not.

‘Why isn’t it a real fire?’ I would think every time. If it really went up in flames, maybe I would get a day off work. If the fire burned quickly, consuming the documents, the computers, the filing cabinets, then there would be nothing to do the next day, the only thing we’d have to do is flee from the fire using the stairs.

In the process of this there would be a ghostly band singing: I don’t want to work, I despise work, I hate work, Why do I have to work… The rhythm of this song was clear and it’s melody was dull, it matched, by chance, the sound of footsteps, the stairway extended endlessly upwards in line with their song, making it impossible to get to the end. The ghostly sounds faded gradually in the dense smoke, in the end, we too were devoured by the flames… Isn’t that a horrible ending?

Unfortunately the fire alarms are always a false alarm, nothing has really happened, we never get any holidays for it. So I put on my headphones and listen to this song ‘Our company wants to lay three hundred people off'.

The employees are scared they won’t be able to cash in on their dreams

They all want to escape the demonic corporate grip

They don’t want to stay here much longer

They want to leave and get a month’s compensation for their trouble

In the job three years but the salary is only raised to 10000 dollars per month

The company is buzzing

Every day to the early hours

In all the nooks and crannies of the stairs

there is a four piece band

like ghosts

but the song is moving

the chorus

goes like this:

‘I want you to lay me off

I want you to lay me off

But you always lay off the wrong person

The people you lay off are all good

I want you to lay me off

I want you to lay me off

But you always lay off the wrong person

I’m the one in the company who should really be laid off

Xiao yi The worst kind of love story in which boys and girls don’t hold hands

The girl always remembered, when with a certain ambivalence she faced her 17th birthday, the boy bought a cake for her as a prank, insisting on wishing her happy birthday at the school gate in the morning to make her feel awkward. Their bodies couldn’t have been held further apart when they hugged in parting, but it didn’t stop one of her instructors from interrogating her at length when he saw them at the gate.

Many years later, he’d already become a captivating woman, the stories of his on and off relationships with those men were the all related in the girl’s company. The two of them, inseperable since puberty, were always confused for lovers. I remember when I first met them, I guessed that the girl might have once thought there could be something more between them. Just like the 2005 hit‘A Boy Like You’ by unconventional and talented lyricist Huang Weiwen from Hong Kong, Fiona Sit, not yet 25 years old sang with such frankness, as if pushing a boy for an answer as to why, why she could only ever be like a sister to him?

The girl and the boy drift back into my line of sight again, I hear them talking about their plans to go swim, the girl wants to to introduce her new boyfriend to him. In an instant I remembered that there was another version of the song by Chet Lam and Miriam Yeung, the two of them give off a sisterly air to the performance, but they tease each other about other possibilities, at the end wishing happiness for each other.

Looking at the two of them as they depart, perhaps along the way they’ve clashed or mistrusted one another, but without doubt, the present is the happiest ending for the story.